Freedom of the Press/History/Country sources/Transcendentalism
What have religious and philosophical traditions contributed to our understanding of this right?
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism and Freedom of the Press
To the transcendentalists, the matters of self-cultivation and social change were integral to the flourishing of the soul. Part and parcel of this process of becoming a self that is in harmony with natural divinity and a unity with itself is the discovery and articulation of truth as it is experienced by the individual. Transcendentalists engaged in lectures, discussions, and publication of ideas in intellectual circles throughout New England. The focus on issues of politics, religion, and the rights of human beings came into the public sphere through journals, newspapers, and other periodicals that published the works of various transcendentalist thinkers. (Andrews).
A famous example, though almost entirely inconsequential at the time, of transcendentalist use of free expression was Henry David Thoreau’s tax evasion. Thoreau had stopped paying his taxes in 1842 as a means of protesting slavery and the looming conflict of the Mexican-American War. When the war had actually broken out, Thoreau publicly made his anti-war position known, and was promptly prosecuted for his tax evasion, which had been more or less condoned by local authorities until his opposition to the war. Thoreau spent just one night in jail before an anonymous relative paid his due taxes, but the experience paved the way for his justification for his actions in 1849 with “Civil Disobedience” (or “Resistance to Civil Government” as it was titled before his death).
The role of transcendentalists in publishing in intellectual, activist, and abolitionist circles in New England also contributed to the importance of a right to free press and expression in the transcendentalist tradition. Notably, William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, was the source of abolitionist content as it related to the intersection of the cultivation of the self, theology, and spirituality more broadly.
This sentiment is further demonstrated in the works of one of the transcendental writers at the forefront of the intellectual movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson makes a call for an artist to express candidly the truth of the experience of nature and goodness, but also makes reference to the imperative of sharing and publishing such a thing. He writes:
“The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. […] For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare.”
For Emerson, who is serving here as mouthpiece for the transcendental movement more broadly, the use of a free press and publication are essential to becoming ourselves. That’s a fairly esoteric concept, but the broader point stands that the free press is an essential and productive thing for society.
References:
Andrews, Barry M. Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul. University of Massachusetts Press, 2017. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv35q8sj.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The Poet” (https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/poet.html)
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”